- Poster presentation
- Open access
- Published:
Opening the ICU: views of ICU doctors and nurses before and after liberalization of visiting policies
Critical Care volume 16, Article number: P492 (2012)
Introduction
Italian ICUs still impose restrictive visiting policies (with a median visiting time of about 2 hours/day); however, a revision of current policies is underway [1–3]. No data are available on the views of Italian ICU teams following an at least partial liberalization of visiting policies. We investigated this issue in the course of a survey about the impact on ICU teams of the liberalization of visiting policies.
Methods
We administered an anonymous closed-question questionnaire to nurses and doctors at eight ICUs that were about to increase daily visiting time to at least 8 hours, soliciting their views on policy changes in their unit. The ICU staff were asked to fill in the same questionnaire a year after implementation.
Results
The first response rate was 91% (234/258), the second 76% (197/258). In the first instance, 83% of doctors and 67% of nurses expressed a favourable opinion regarding the change in visiting policy. After 1 year a positive opinion was expressed by 84% of doctors and 63% of nurses. Both phases of the study show a significant predominance of positive opinions among doctors (P = 0.032 and 0.005).
Conclusion
Most ICU staff members view the opening of the unit positively, and on the whole maintain this opinion 1 year after the policy change. Overall, the attitude of doctors is more favourable than that of nurses. It is essential to build up a picture of the difficulties that liberalizing visiting could create for ICU staff (and particularly for nurses), and to explore the causes and extent of such difficulties, in order to identify possible solutions and offer nurses and doctors appropriate support.
References
Giannini , et al: Intensive Care Med. 2008, 34: 1256-1262. 10.1007/s00134-008-1037-4.
Giannini , et al: Intensive Care Med. 2011, 37: 1890-10.1007/s00134-011-2331-0.
Giannini , et al: Pediatr Crit Care Med. 2011, 12: e46-e50. 10.1097/PCC.0b013e3181dbe9c2.
Acknowledgements
The study was supported by Associazione per il Bambino Nefropatico (Milan, Italy).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
About this article
Cite this article
Giannini, A., Miccinesi, G., Prandi, E. et al. Opening the ICU: views of ICU doctors and nurses before and after liberalization of visiting policies. Crit Care 16 (Suppl 1), P492 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1186/cc11099
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/cc11099